News Summary

SPRINGFIELD — At the end of his dedication to "Beautiful Ferncliff," the handsome book sure to find its place beneath a forest of Clark County Christmas trees this season, co-author Paul "Ski" Schanher III, turns to Cicero:

"The life of the dead," the Roman orator said, "consists in being present in the minds of the living."

Clearly, through its brief biographies of them, the handsome 237-page volume Schanher has written with veteran genealogist and researcher Anne Benston will go a long way toward resuscitating the memories of the dozens of soldiers, boxers, vaudevillians, temperance campaigners and abolitionists buried in the cemetery.

But the two Springfielders' book does more than that.

"Beautiful Ferncliff" brings to life the cemetery itself; acquaints us more intimately with the trees that add so much to the character of the landscape; and explores the romantic ideas of those who helped to create a burial ground that is one of the most beloved locales of the community.

A silent eloquence

Founded in the first half of the 19th century, the rural cemetery movement sought to make cemeteries more than depositories for the dead.

Quoting a National Park Service description of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery, the book says: "In marked contrast to colonial burying grounds, the cemetery was also intended to provide a place for the commemoration of the lives and works of the deceased. Concerned with shaping a common celebratory history for the new nation, Mount Auburn's founders wanted monuments erected to reflect the accomplishments of local individuals."

In sponsoring the publication of the book subtitled "Springfield's Historic Cemetery & Arboretum," the Turner Foundation seems to have had much the latter in mind.

Although Mount Auburn was more than 30 years old when Ferncliff was dedicated on July 4, 1864, the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., had been dedicated the previous Nov. 19, withPresident Abraham Lincoln giving his historic address.

Sharing the stage with Lincoln that day was orator Edward Everett, who spoke of the eloquence of that cemetery's beauty in a way that touches on the reasons so many love Ferncliff.

"Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning years ... the graves of our brethren beneath our feet — it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and nature."

A practical problem

If the vision for Ferncliff was poetic, Benston and Schanher's research unearthed the very practical reason for its founding in city council minutes: "The demand for burial lots (has) so far exceeded the probability of the city council to supply ... that members (feel) compelled to take action on the subject."

With the mounting burials exceeding the capacity of Greenmount Cemetery, a cemetery association was formed Aug. 25, 1863, to look into the matter.

The association soon bought 70 acres from the widow of Henry Bechtle at $100 an acre.

Industrialists and community leaders Benjamin Warder and G.S. Foos "oversaw the contracted removal of dead timber and assorted living trees to prepare the grounds," the book reports.

And when the cemetery was dedicated, the Springfield Republic trumpeted the occasion like a bugler from a Union Army that was still in the field: "The fact is, our cemetery park, as a whole and in detail, is one of the finest of its kind in American, and there is certainly nothing like it in Europe."

By then dozens of caskets had been relocated to Ferncliff, and its first new burial had occurred: George Clemens "who died of spotted fever at the tender age of 8 years, 11 months and 24 days" was buried there June 21, 1864.

A tale of two Octobers

The book's coverage of the cemetery's early history recounts the heartrending tale of its first superintendent, John Dick.

Dick, who helped to lay out the grounds, was living in the house attached to a picturesque wooden entrance to the cemetery at its Plum Street entrance in 1878 when he and wife, Catherine Fitzsimmons Dick, lost their youngest and oldest children within 10 days to diphtheria.

The next October, Mrs. Dick drowned herself in Buck Creek and was found by another of the Dick children. Dick's father died five weeks later, recently arrived from Scotland with his wife to lend their son a hand.

All, of course, were buried in the cemetery John Dick helped to create.

The less dramatic aspects of Ferncliff's history will be of interest to locals as well.

Operating costs were kept down by donations of horse-drawn mowers by manufacturers William Whiteley and Phineas P. Mast.

An agreement to let members of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans group, work on the Soldier's Mound "quickly resolved" what the authors say "could have become a sensitive, ongoing issue."

Also of interest is how some of the cemetery's seemingly most natural and beautiful sites were created as the cemetery board wrestled with flooding caused by the terrain and its natural springs.

The authors note that Kelly's Lake, dedicated Feb. 23, 1887, flowed from an engineering study whose purpose was "solving the cemetery's ongoing drainage problems while, at the same time, bolstering water supply to maintain grass."

Seven years later, the board OK'd a project to drain the whole cemetery and another that converted perennially flooded areas into places for burial plots.

Schanher and Benston tell us that "today, the results ... ensure year-round beauty along Ferncliff's Plum Street entrances, sustaining the picturesque waterfalls that serve as the centerpiece of many a photographer's composition."

A mark of honor

Many of the cemetery's most striking monuments and mausoleums were created when the generation that helped to create Ferncliff passed on.

Gov. Asa Bushnell's death in April 1904 led to the white-pillared monument that gleams on sunny days.

O.S. Kelly died the same month, though the monument that reflects more dramatically on his past may be the previously mentioned lake rather than his grave marker.

But for the community, it was J. Warren Keifer's decision to be buried in Ferncliff that seemed the cemetery's greatest honorf.

A general in both the Civil War and Spanish American War and a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, "although entitled to proper burial with pomp and circumstance in revered Arlington National Cemetery," the authors note, Keifer told the cemetery board he wished to be buried in " 'Beautiful Ferncliff' with my parents, wife and children."

Epitaph

"Beautiful Ferncliff" contains much more rich detail, including the explanation that the word "Machpelah" still carved over the vault where bodies once were kept to await burial refers to the burial spot of Abraham's wife, Sarah, in the Bible.

It also offers this overall assessment.

"Monuments that rise from hallowed ground are at once repositories for the past and inspirations for the future. Because of them, men know from whence they came, and can move forward, keeping in mind those who made the way possible."

"Beautiful Ferncliff" will serve as a lasting reminder of that.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.